SCENE TWENTY (XX)

Я тебе покажу, где раки зимуют

Pronunciation: yah tebbe pokaZHU gdeh raki zimuYUT

Literal translation: I am going to show you where lobsters spend the winter.

Meaning: 

AN ABSTRACT THREAT, “Or else!”

On 10 Fructidor the Bronks Okrug is being completely surrounded by the National Guard and U.A.S. Federal military forces under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security. All of the bridges into Strong Island are check-pointed close. The National Guard opened the day with artilaeary stikes which caused uncontorleld fires in the North Bronks. The smoke from the Okrug can be scene for many miles. Today at a large demonstration shortly before midnight targeted air stikes wiped out most of the deputies gathered at Hostos for the People’s Assmebly. This was still the Bronks though, so the militia foces of Bronks fired back. The siege of central Breuklyn continues, smoldering on. The Ivory New Year begins right before sundown. A strange new year, counted out across time way past 5,000 and change. 

“What year do you people think it is,” Sasho asks Kawa.

“We believe it is 5773.”

“My phone says different. Says, it is actually just 2012 my friend,” Sasho says, “Martina is it 2012?” 

“It’s 2011 on Bulgarian post Soviet time sir, but the Americans think its 2012.”

Kawa interjects,“What if the year we were all told it to be was utterly a lie?”

“What a question!” exclaims Martina.

“What if something terrible once happened and they lost control. The powers that be. So theory wipred it all out. Wipred out memory, history, and time. Then just reset. They reset reality for us all by about 3,000 year out of wach.”

“What a wild assertion!” says Sasho, “You people think its deep in the future?”

“What is the year wasn’t 2012 at all,” explains Kawa, “ but instead it was 5773! Where did nearly three thousand years of human devleopment go? No one ever asks that. Why are some people using the moon and others the sun to track the months? Why was the Gregoran calender and the Julian calender so far off the date the Ivory have set? The phone devices, the shift calenders, even google say the year is 2012. The year the Mayans say the world will end. The phones and calenders they have in the work camps sat it is THURSDAY. But why does the week have seven days, not ten? Who decided on that? According to the Ivory the month is called Tishrei, and this is the evening of a new year. 1 Tishrei 5773.

But, Sebastian doesn’t keep time on the clock of bondage, deception, or the clock of invisble friends. To him and the members of this club, it isn’t really September, it isn’t actually Tishrei. The week has ten days not seven. There are ACTUALLY two days of work. Then two days of rest. Then two days of work, followed by four days of rest.  And this is the month of Fructidor. The month of Fruits.

“There is no J letter in old Ivory, so I don’t know how we can be called the Jews, or Jewish, or Judean. I was a Y sound; Yehud, Yudea, Yudean. The romans used the J sound.”

“Ivory is an Americanization of Eivrei; where they get the world Hebrew from.”

At a tavern of very ill repute on Ludlow Street some friends are getting ready for “A JUDEAN NEW YEAR’S PREGAME PARTY” on a Thursday evening, or such it was billed at on the place cards.

“Why are some of you called Ask-a-Nazi? And others called Suffer-dick?” Martina asks Kawa pouring him some Astika into a glass.

“I think some of us just took the name the master oppressor gave us,” Kawa replies, “and some did not.”

Slavi Perchevney the sullen enforcer doesn’t need a list, not even the drop of a name. He’s killed many people before. He will have to do so again, “That’s how the news is looking these days”. He either knows the faces of the regulars. Or you pay and that’s it. Maybe you look like the $20 mark or maybe $40 mark, it’s a call he can make quickly and quietly. Mostly if one is a big chested female, or a big spender type the price per ticket goes down. For a regular though, it costs nothing. He takes responsibility for the trouble caused by those he or she brings to the Tavern. Mehanata is lit up this Thursday for almost Ivory New Years, mostly an excuse for Z.O.B. officers to congregate, report and share a beverage. The city is going up in flames around them.

Step down the hall, go straight, not upstairs, go past the coat check unless you want to be robbed, open the second wooden door and leave the time, space zone. The lights are now quite dim, the place is still cast in a dead, red light and loud gypsy Jazz is playing from the band below. Welcome to Mehanata, the Bulgarian Tavern in the wilderness of North America.

Rafael laughs off the varying contradictions and swills back his cold Astika beer. The Bulgarian bartenders by now know the sober pensive Kawa as well as the dumb faltering drunk Kawa and they wonder what metamorphosis this latest tale will bring. Although he acts like a humble outsider he is known in this haunt since 2001. Bottles have been broken over heads! Guns have been drawn and unloaded. Disaster has befallen him and glory too. And he is not like all the other Americans people know who come here. Kawa believes in things which are dangerous to speak of. Kawa has always been under Sasho’s roof. The tavern attracts many good tales and vice mongering spirits. The tavern has been the roof on which Kawa has laid huge plots and fallen down with no teeth. But he is not just a regular. He is the favorite American of the Voorhi Alexander Pervechnvny. Surprisingly he never gloats on that or uses it to drink on the house. Perhaps because some person or group of people keeps wiping out his mind.   

Justin, Sasho, and a troop of little Mexican wet backs are down in the sub-basement digging with pick axes and shovels. There is a hatch under the basement chamber called ‘the ice cage’. The wall-to-wall ice box where wall-to-wall two minutes of binge vodka drinking happens at fifteen dollars a minute. It’s all the exact same vodka bottled up and cut in various ways. Well the floor has a hidden hatchway that drops you quite deep into a smuggling tunnel out to Breuklyn via the old train lines and then out to a pier in Coney Island’s Sea Gate City.  

They’re not digging a new tunnel. They’re digging a demolition bin so they can completely blow apart and seal the hatch and the tunnel to Breuklyn behind them in the event of a big police raid. Which will not be long coming. Especially with all these terrorists and spies fucking about in the Tavern every weekend for the past six weeks. 

Kawa Zivistan has a short palaver with Rafael and Viktoria on the subject of Daria Andreavna, then stands outside the social club with the Fenian bouncer James White.

“You’re becoming quite a regular again,” says James White the former cop, “That’s what they call a real poor life decision.”

“I used to come here when it was on Canal.”

“The old place eh.”

Raided often and burned to the ground in 2005. Many were killed.

The burly Fenian bouncer looks every bit like an off-duty cop. Maybe, just maybe he smiles a little bit more.

They’ve spoken amicably of their blue-collar nights many times previously. When Kawa is heartbroken as both Maria and Yelizaveta rendered him the past four years, when those two relationships ended he took back to the tavern. Because the best way to get over a woman is to get under another woman, as everyone knows. But his will as man was vanquished. That is a polite way of saying he had no ability or will to entice women on the dance or make small talk with young loose women that so fill the dance hall. It was in these periods he got to know Rafael and Viktoria in different capacities. Got to palaver with a lot of the insiders he used to know in other forgotten lives like Justin, James, James, Hella, Tanya and Sasho sometimes.

They had all supposedly met three years prior at the Tabor Gypsy festival on Floyd Bennett Field and he had become a confidant to Rafael ’s revolutionist notions and Viktoria’s worries on her husbands’ ways. His cheating. Rafael it seemed lack anyone to palaver with on the issues of the world, philosophy or his long held beliefs in socialism, and Victoria on whose shoulder Kawa cried about his lost loves was also quite willing to console her about Rafael ’s alleged philander which was not quite real, but wasn’t either quite imagined. 

“You’re becoming quite a regular again. I’d say for sure. Slavi lets you in without paying? I’d say that means you’re carrying the card now, again.”

“It’s supposedly a rebel friendly place.”

“For now. It’s quite getting bad up in the Bronx. Maybe you heard. We may switch loyalties back to those with the truest monopoly on violence. The state. You might have to eat your fix somewhere else before the stakes get too high. Before the cheese leads you to the mouse trap.”

“Good to know!”

“All we partly retired civil servants have to stick together,” says James White, “no matter which foreign government might be paying either of our bills this week. Don’t come here on a Wednesday though whatever you do, it’s a whole other crowd.”

“Worried I’ll shoot the place up?”

“I’m worried you’ll see things you don’t really want to see, again. Or remember, things people might have done to you,” says James White the Fenian, “remember things about yourself. That is highly dangerous to remember.” 

Card stock place holders on candle lit tables towards the back of the third floor declare several long wooden tables: “Reserved for the Banshee Otriad ”. Sixty some core and provisional Kadro members of the Newyorkgrad Banshee Association, a clandestine organization of EMTS, Paramedics and Emergency workers are drunk or drinking, loudly occupying the third floor mezzanine of the Mehanata Social Club.

Except for the club’s current ‘Chief-of-Staff’ the Haitian Paramedic Emile Cange, who is a nominally straight laced Seventh Day Adventist and his fiance Praise Augustus, well it’s almost midnight and the music is blaring dancehall in their honor, and Zivistan is calling for a toast. A running joke in the club was that for the past decade or so they never seemed to miss an opportunity to go hard drinking on an Ivoryish holiday.

There are a lot of Ivoryish holidays, approximately twenty of them resulting in innumerous number of work days to be taken off on top of the Friday into Saturday Sabbath, which man of the club members had paperwork submitted to their employers, were their shops union stating that they couldn’t work on these assorted holidays and also, Fridays past 3pm.

At some point Trickovitch had sat down with a calendar and made the calculation that utilizing the Ivoryish religion’s observances, one could get a whole lot of rest. And it caught on. Pretty soon over half the club carried bonafide conversion papers, certificates of Bar Mitzvah and bris where appropriate, kutb marriage contracts, the world.

Nikholai and the man named Lt. Moishe Klein, the clubs only actually practicing Orthodox Ivory had made some Russian rabbis in Brighton a good price and long term agreement they couldn’t refuse.

“Hamesh, Arba, Sheloash, Styeim, Ehkhad!, Happy Jewish new year!” yells Kawa Zivistan slapping Mickhi Dbrisk on the back. Although, there are still two actual days to Ivory New Year, this being the Rosh Hashanah Pregame Party for the club’s inner circle. The New Year itself doesn’t fall on a weekend. But Thursday is an adequate party night too, sometimes near the end of the world.

Kawa Zivistan, with a gray flash in his eyes, is now dead sober somehow. As if the drinks he’d pounded, all five Astikas and three Stoli shots, and the bottle of red, then white there were glasses, real cold glasses of bubbly Borjomi mineral water.

Somehow in the Melee of the dancehall, in the flashing light and flickering candles of this tavern he had tuned out his fun and put upon the game face mask of his title, Chief Planning Officer of the Banshee Association. Surely not all thirty two of the guests were beyond all pale of corruption, but Banshee was a proto trade union with a 10-13 fund and an underground ambulance newspaper. Anyone could sign up. 

But now at the round dimly lit table at the end of the long catwalk above the main dance floor, past an easily removed barricade was seated Dbrisk, the Bajan businessman Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who always carried in his own sweet wine bottles; Mara the half pint Fenian always drunk at these things, Trickovitch, paramedic biker Anya Drovtich, Nicholas Mapfre (only there under peer pressure and perpetually nervous), Chief-of-Staff Emile Cange, a paramedic and Zivistan the leadership as it were, out of sight, out of mind looking over a document printed on gray card stock, downloaded and translated just the night before.

The Anonymous, the vast anarchist hacker underground, had circulated a cut and paste manifesto. One which Banshee could never overtly endorse, but certainly various operatives of its armed wing, the Z.O.B. were certain to lend their talents behind. It is to be a collective response to the uprising and its grievances.

At all major Banshee gatherings, there was copious amounts of booze consumed, the Mehanata Social Club such a choice place for meetings and for gatherings for it was loud and rowdy and hard to bug, or hard to track the ins and outs, hard to see who signed what, under who’s name, easy to deny anything.

A version of this document had circulated for weeks, the uprising though aborted on the labor day weekend had to meet the popular response, the demonstrations happening in all the boroughs; the wild anarchy about to happen on 17 Fructidor, 2011 when the anarchist federations, unions, socialist parties, student groups and the usual left suspects sought to again storm the District Financial. This thing they’re all signing, it’s written in Ivory.

That following evening of Fructidor  11^th Kawa and dozens of other activists using the Signal text dispatch system, boarded the subway cars with flicker masks and blue fatigues. They took nearly every train line hostage across 5 boroughs, all numbers, letters and colors. Terror and spectacle abound! Not even one lethal bullet in the guns, which almost no units even had to brandish; the captive audiences were petrified or participatory in the action.

Kawa’s unit takes over the A train Manhattan bound from the Rockaways alongside an anarchist named Spiker, the actor Siegfried Sassoon, Fenian Mara Fitzduff and an Otriad film maker named Nicholas Mapfre. Mapfre, a childhood friend of Sebastian had at some point realized that when the revolution did break out, he’d like to be able to film it.

Dasha called out to him earlier on the black berry smartphone to ask him to be careful. She is no damsel in distress and he is no Shamel Basayev, this time. But she knows him much better than he knows she or she works for. She knows he’s waking up from a daydream.

Trains are stormed all over the city for mostly militant public addresses and passing out of homework assignments from big gray bags. Although, all of them are emptied right before the District financial where many cross. Emptied and dynamited. The bankers take cabs to work, caps or ferries or are driven. This is to keep all of their surfs away. Deter servitude.

The speech needs to be cut short because he gives it over each transfer of the cars. Sometimes Spiker Timchenko or Siggy Sassoon or Mara Fitzduff gave speeches. It begins with, “My name is Zachariah Artstien, an organizer with the human rights resistance! Affiliated with the Z.O.B., we are not here to hurt anyone or take your money! We are here to declare that you have human rights and we must now link arms and fight for them.”

“Today is the 11^th of Fructidor, when ten years ago the Oligarchs manufactured an attack on us to secure their power and control. In six days the People’s Army of the General Resistance Alliance will attack the District Financial itself! If you ain’t running with it, run from it!”

Newyorkgrad is the city of such theatrical disturbances. It’s also a mind-your-fucking business city. Its people are also heavily armed. But no one pulls on them tonight.

“Please don’t get yourself shot to ferment hope for you alone,” Dasha warns him and she hopes he isn’t killed because he is capable of making a woman care about him. But perhaps not her on a long enough time line.

Kawa and his associates with their scary flicker masks, one with a video camera, tell tales of the People’s Protection Units of Rojava. Of Ivory apartheid. Of the one Noire or Mestizo youth killed every 48 hours by the police. Of the 1 in 8 American Noire men in prison. Of war, endless war consuming all around for the dubious purposes of Afghan and Iraqi and Persian “liberations”. The conspirators film the whole thing, in case they are captured or killed. For the viewers at home on the Live-streams.

After all the tales end, told by the three hostage taking narrators, “We are sorry for our operations washing aside considerations of your health and safety. You cannot join us, we are organized tight as a drum, but go to your churches, mosques and temples, your gangs, crews and neighborhood councils, stay strong and carry on as we are all under siege together.”

And to a captive train load, an adaptive audience held hostage, the cameras of Nicholas Mapfre running, Kawa began a speech, about a four minute speech per car. 

“Hyper-development is the physical and moral state of core country populations that result from proximity to overabundance!” 

“While each core country maintains an underclass of newly arrived immigrants, ethnic subturns, welfare subsidiaries, helot serfs and others are utilized for domestic exploitation on a variety of levels. Low cost wage labor, military or police service, undesirable or dangerous work, service sectors and prostitution; jobs considered below the acceptability of core ethnic identity in power.”

No one got up to open fire on them yet, which was good, as they were wearing blue uniforms and crazed masks in the age of public transport terror. 

“Noires in the United States, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany or various former colonial groups in England. However, nearly every person citizen or undocumented migrant residing in a core country can despite low probability of achieving meaningful wealth; access a range of social services, enjoy relative security and purchase a full range of consumer goods. Hyper-development affects all within the territories of the Core.”

“While clearly some of the highest Palma Index and GINI coefficient variances occur within the core at a rate in the United States of 47 to 1 in wealth difference; hyper development is the result of goods, commodities and general capital flows back to the centers of financial hegemony; New York, Berlin, Geneva and London.”

Now Spike Timchenko jumped in, his mask was a grimacing ghost sleep no more mask; “While the political directives of the U.S.A. form the overt course of policy and international relations; shared race, history and basic cultural religious values have allowed for Euro-American elite consensus to function more fluidly than its 1945-1989 core contender and nemesis the Soviet Union grappling with a far wider ethnic elite, a less structurally manageable economic system and a far new set of oligarchs; the inner circle Kadro of the Democratic Confederalist Party, K.G.B. and subsequent energy moguls.”

He wonders if they understand anything he’s saying, wonders if they have unplugged from their smartphones and iPods. 

Spiker the anarcho syndicalist continues;

“Hyper development leads to things like the U.S. obesity epidemic, high levels of moral decay such as the feminist consensus that 1/3 women in the US is a victim of sexual assault before age 18. It is access to too much food, constant imperatives to purchase more of everything, the owning of multiple vehicles per family, the imagined entitlement to home ownership and the ownership of homes far in excess of what a family unit requires. It is an exaggerated sense of importance and uniqueness.” 

He concludes as the train rumbles into the upcoming station.

“It is a complete apathy as to what is occurring not only in one’s own community but certainly the rest of the world. It is media oversaturation; constantly plugged in cell phones, movies, music and video games. It is a decline in meaningful literacy, a tacit embrace of ethnocentric white (in the case of the current hegemonic order) supremacy. It is over availability of print media and pundit debate, but relatively poor engagement of the political machine itself. It is the right to vote between red and blue flavors. It is a severely myopic worldview manufactured by the educational system and media.”

“Power to the people!” an old Noire man says and pumps his fist.

“We are asking for you to work in sympathy with the resistance,” says Zivistan, “we have a bag of homework assignments. Simple ways to assist the general strike and uprising coming on 17 Fructidor. The best way you can assist it is to join us in the streets. If you cannot stay at home. Wall Street will be a battlefield. Support the American division of the Resistance anyway you are able.” 

They were mostly greeted with quiet applause, but no one shoots at them or turns them in. And in this city that counts for something. Most people take home work, perhaps largely out of curiosity. Later Kawa Zivistan and his three cohorts are at the end of the line and the job has been carried without any of the possible predictions of arrest by the authorities or mob violence against them. A sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to see that on the eve of Fructidor  11^th, 11 years later, security is tight as drum,” notes Spiker Timchenko an anarchist, also a childhood friend of ‘Zachariah’, the sometimes nom de guerre of Kawa Zivistan in the Middle East.

So when Kawa gets back to the financial district and he confirms around 2am with Dasha he’s un-arrested and also alive and she breathes back a sign. He writes a new poem for her. Place it in old school gold painted stationary. Dedicating resistance to her, although to her, it is more like street theater carried up on a moving, highly privileged stage.

Daria texts him;

“Don’t disappear jsut yet man. I made you a painting of your bleeding heart.”

Bleeding out yes, unasked for and unheeded, a mighty pump. His heart was quite known to hemorrhage over little and for nothing at all.